Letter to Editor: Justice in the Service of Empire

Yvonne Ridley's anguished opinion 'Truth about US justice' has appeared worldwide including in the Pakistani press. Ms. Ridley bemoans the travesty of justice in the US court's pronouncement of its guilty verdict on the frail, tortured daughter of Pakistan, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. The veteran journalist is perhaps unaware of the import of the following revealing words of a US Supreme Court justice which were uttered in 1951:

“To those who would paralyze our Government in the face of impending threat by encasing it in a semantic strait-jacket, we must reply that all concepts are relative.”

This lesser known utterance by the highest lawman of the United States came right on the heals of the victorious Allies administering the absolute victor's justice at Nuremberg to the defeated Nazis with these famous words of its chief prosecuting counsel, Robert H. Jackson:

“... we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

There is nothing surprising in the guilty verdict, nor in the conduct of the servile Pakistani rulers leading up to the verdict, and nor in the utterances of the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Ann Patterson. To have expected anything else after all the careful preparations that went into enacting this puppetshow on the world stage by carefully fabricating the show trial and its attendant media demonization of Dr. Aafia, only betrays immense naiveté of the inner-workings of empire.

In my view, the prima facie “Truth about US justice” is that “justice” is in the service of empire, as it always has been! The madam Ambassador of the United States to Pakistan has only executed the core purpose of her diplomatic post rather faithfully in the service of her empire.

Justice in these times, like everything else, including science, politics, history, literature, cinema, news (which is often indistinguishable from cinema), and of course political-science, is continually put in the diabolical service of empire. The only veritable truths are the imperial proclamations of the white man – from who did 911 to Global War on Terror to Global Warming to Global Epidemics to Global Financial Collapse to Global Governance. These history-constructions by incremental faits accomplis are the sine qua non for one-world government and cannot be constrained in any moral “semantic strait-jacket”.

It's not like the beleaguered Pakistanis don't know it – we even have the East India Company's achievements to guide us – but apparently, we, the 'untermensch', never quite seem to learn its lessons. And that's really the only pernicious secret of the enduring hidden strength of the golem behind all its guns and butter offerings to its victims before slaughtering them. The veritable strength of its 'Samson locks': our own price!

The former Director of the ISI, Brig. Tirmazi, narrated the following about us Pakistanis in his 1996 book Profiles of Intelligence:

' ... It would be fair to ask what we [the ISI] did to counter the US machinations? Well we did not, and could not do any thing beyond reporting to the highest authority in the country. There are reasons for our inaction:

One, neither the ISI nor the IB is designed or equipped to counter the machinations of a Super Power.

Two, an important factor is our own price. A lot has been said and written by some of our American friends about the price of a Pakistani. Dr. Andrew V. Corry, US Counsel General at Lahore, once said, “Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky.” He may not be too far wrong. We did observe some highly placed Pakistanis selling their conscience, prestige, dignity and self-respect for a small price.' (page 45, emphasis added)

The point of this unsubtle resignation request by the courageous Ms. Ridley to show some moral backbone among the errand boys and girls of empire, even as it is merely being rhetorical, is entirely meaningless even in its rhetoric for two reasons: 1) it is a moral request in a global governance system which is beyond good and evil, one which brazenly asserts “hegemony is as old as mankind”, and which puts morality itself directly in the service of empire; and 2) given that the highest-order-bit of the systemic disease among the 'untermensch' has apparently already been apportioned as our national destiny!

Crises are defining moments for nations, and for a people. Some rise to it. Others fall before it. Pakistan as a nation has evidently decided the latter course of action – and this is palpably apparent from the statements of Pakistan's own Ambassador to Washington:

'“Foreign relations are not discussed in poetry, ... Saddam Husain’s last speech was also full of poetry but it could not save him or his nation”', and that 'relationships between nations are based on ground realities'.

While it is true that most in Pakistan are very upset by what has befallen Dr. Aafia Siddiqui as yet another victim of “imperial mobilization” – only one among the millions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan's Tribal-Belt, all along the 'arc of crisis' in the “global zone of percolating violence”, etc. – the handful who did publicly protest this latest visitation of empire's justice upon a frail tortured woman in a nation of almost 200 million, did so only symbolically. And this show of moral bravado despite the fact that Dr. Aafia has become the inextricable symbol of the summation of all the abhorrent injustices purveyed upon women in wars – from rape to rape – and no mere words can ever capture her indescribable agony! Yet, most Pakistanis have only expressed our moral outrage and displayed our fine moral tenor from the comforts of our living room. Just as we did when Iraqi women were being raped, tortured, and disappeared in the service of empire not too long ago. Then we returned back to our daily grind.

Symbols of morality, like talismans, are no match for hard orchestrated events of “imperial mobilization”. And especially when arsonists are running all the fire brigades in a nation where its masses are more closely tied to their daily bread than to matters of state or national survival. The apathetic public well understands that many more arsonists eagerly await in the wings to take the place of their predecessors. The masses are well aware that the Pakistani elite, the ever patriotic praetorian guards, and their coterie of miserable sycophants have already learnt that while one's abject service to empire can sometimes be hazardous to one's existential wellness, it also routinely calls for new faces in many a chief's seat and presents the fabulous opportunity to loot and plunder anew in the name of patriotism.

'She should then pick up the phone to the US president and tell him to release Aafia and return Pakistan’s most loved, respected and famous daughter and reunite her with the two children who are still missing. Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another ... one of resignation.',

will only deprive madam Ambassador of a well-earned livelihood and comfortable retirement for no fault of her own. She merely faithfully discharged her service contract to her own empire. And it will do nothing for Pakistan either, for we, as a nation, are serving exactly the same interests. When these aren't even our own!

I humbly recommend instead that madam American Ambassador be the next in line to be awarded the glorious Freedom Medal by the White House. President Obama has already received his Nobel Peace Prize.

Reprint License

All
material copyright (c) Project HumanbeingsfirstTM, with
full permission to copy, repost, and reprint, in its entirety,
unmodified and unedited, for any purpose, granted in perpetuity,
provided the source URL sentence and this copyright notice are also reproduced verbatim as part
of this restricted Reprint License, along with any embedded links within its
main text, and not doing so may be subject to copyright license
violation infringement claims pursuant to remedies noted at
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html. All figures, images,
quotations and excerpts, are used without permission based on
non-profit "fair-use" for personal education and research
use only in the greater public interest, documenting crimes
against humanity, deconstructing current affairs, and scholarly
commentary. The usage by Project Humanbeingsfirst of all external
material is minimally consistent with the understanding of "fair
use" laws at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html.
Project Humanbeingsfirst does not endorse any external website or organization it links to or references, nor those that may link to it or reprint its works.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of US Copyright Laws, you
are provided the material from Project Humanbeingsfirst upon your
request, and taking any action that delivers you any of its documents
in any form is considered making a specific request to receive the
documents for your own personal educational and/or research use. You
are directly responsible for seeking the requisite permissions from
other copyright holders for any use beyond “fair use”.